The only thing that would have been better than Joe Torre telling the Yankees "later" would have been if he had called a news conference himself and added that, oh, by the way, I've also accepted an offer to manage, say, the St. Louis Cardinals -- or, better yet, the New York Mets.
What a great day Thursday was for Yankees arrogance.
What a relief it all must have been for Torre.
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| Life without Joe Torre? In the short term, not fun for Brian Cashman and George Steinbrenner. (AP) |
Especially because, and this is the important part, he deserved to be re-hired without so much as a second thought.
While the Yankees propaganda machine continues to blast the same sound-bite loop 24/7 -- "We expect to win the World Series every year!" -- there are a couple of key points to make.
1. That's an impossible goal, as even Hal Steinbrenner, new Yankees general partner and son of George, admitted during Thursday's conference call.
2. Despite being handed a fatally flawed pitching staff, Torre's Yankees still rebounded from a miserable start and compiled the best record in baseball from May 29 on.
As in, a better record than each of the 29 other teams.
I don't know who the next Yankees manager is going to be -- Don Mattingly? Joe Girardi? The corpse of Billy Martin? -- but I can guarantee this: Other than perhaps general manager Brian Cashman, there will come a day when the Yankees look back on the Torre era and realize that they never fully appreciated what they had until it was too late.
(Cashman? He may have been the only person in the front office to get it. He saved Torre's job a year ago. He didn't this year. As they say, in baseball, .500 is a pretty good average.)
These are the points the New York brain trust should have considered while ensconced at Yankee Headquarters South in Tampa, Fla., this week:
• What other manager ever even entertained the notion of that kind of staying power under owner George Steinbrenner?
